Major flaw in SandForce SSD controllers (as used in SSD 520, etc)

[idata]

Hello.

I am posting this here as a warning to others to stay away from any SandForce based SSD (as used in Intel's 5xx series and others, included).

We have now had a number of catastrophic failures of these drives. It is patently apparent that SandForce couldn't design a compliant and stable SATA based SSD controller if their lives depended upon it.

The AES256 issue itself was unforgivable, but it at least it didn't lose data, although it shows well enough that such a "flaw" to pass any kind of due diligence and testing means that either there wasn't any proper testing, or worse, that they knew about it and just hoped that no one would discover it.

Now users are having major issues with the failure of the SSD's SATA controller to properly respond to ATA Sleep/Wakeup and SATA Disconnect/Reconnect events. The result is bad context restoration and corruption of the drive state information resulting in a drive locked in a "panic mode" where the controller will fail to reset and the drive will no longer appear as a SATA device to the host.

Basically, if you have an SSD that is SandForce based, you *will* lose your data at some point. It is only a matter of time.

For those shills proclaiming that "it's an incompatibility with SATA controllers", it's most definitely not - it's an incompatibility with their moron "engineers" who can't read and properly implement the SATA specification documents.

For those who will claim "mine is still working fine" all I can say is consider yourself lucky and ensure you back up your data whilst you can.

In our testing the issue is most prevalent when using SATA6G host interfaces, but it may well also occur at lower speeds.

We are in discussions with Intel and some recovery companies attempting to recover our data, but are hindered by SandForce's use of forced encryption as an attempt to obscure the data. This is not about your data security, it's really all about them trying to hinder attempts at analysis of their controllers after such failures to hide their culpability.

Not that I blame Intel directly, but I would have expected a company that values its global reputation to have performed more stringent in house testing before it committed to using and putting its name on drives that used such a flawed controller.

Mario.

[idata]

Welcome to the club of sorrow....

But we have been testing some 6GB/s SATA 2TB drives here with 64MB cache... They are conventional spinning disk drives... Now-a-days. They just about perform the SAME as these fancy solid state drives but with 13GB/$ prices!!!

The "real speed" is super limited by your CPU + other hardware now. About 100MB/sec... In many cases with a modern HDs, solid state just is not an advantage at all...

In your case... Intels are infants in HD technology... They don't know anything at all... Sandforce is their master of VERY failed knowledge... Who ever cared about HD "firmware" problems before.... You "should" have backups on test hardware to like 15 years back you know... All hardware will fail even if it is not all messed up by bad design... I have some 12 year old servers here that have never been rebooted... I bet they won't if I tried now But they could be covered in minutes... We just run them still because they are still cool!!!

Very oddly, the last test machine with Intel's SSDs we have here is the one I am typing on right now... I guess now, I will order even this machine to to purged of their SSD hardware...

It is very sad really... Even "I" trusted them so much...

Update - I just ordered my last machine here to be purged of the Intel test drive... It will be destroyed as a failure... But in mild use... It really does work just fine still...

I always used to say, go with very old brand name hard drives... But I don't buy Seagate anymore right now after like 20 years... Toshiba/Hitachi for conventional, and Samsung 840 for SSDs... But what the heck do "I" know after 38 years... The games are changing very very fast now, so be very very careful!!! Trust no one really...

My first 10MB IBM hard drive cost me $1400. So I maybe am too old now But when the morning comes here, I will have that 2TB filled about 70% up And, I don't run Microsoft on any machines anymore. So when God comes for me, I am ready!!

[idata]

piranha wrote:

Welcome to the club of sorrow....My first 10MB IBM hard drive cost me $1400.

I've been using a 520 series SSD 240GB for over a year now and it's been totally reliable. OTOH, I've had mechanical spinning disk drives fail after 6 months. Recently moved the SSD to a motherboard which supports SATA 6, now my Windows Experience Index number is maxed out at 7.9.

Your 10MB IBM HD was a full height 5.25" MFM most likely made by Seagate or Miniscribe. Used one for a year in an IBM XT. Later I got my hands on a real IBM AT with a 20MB hard drive, thought I was on top of the world. A year later I bought a 60MB Mitsubishi RLL with a Western Digital controller card, that was real cutting edge stuff back then.

I love Intel and Microsoft products, admit the truth, so do you 🙂

[idata]

I love Intel and Microsoft products, admit the truth, so do you 🙂

I have no problem with any Intel hardware or the chips! They are the best!!! It is the SSD firmware that was the big problem for me. The SSD hardware side looks great really. Maybe they will update the firmware sometime and fix everything. Hope hope... OP's problem here sounds far worse than my SE command problem, but I did not run into anything like his situation.

I used to write and store programs on punch cards... So guess how old I am...

Microsoft... I really have not used it much since Vista. Windows 8 sure is funny though... Seems like everyone is going to wait for 9. But that is their world, not mine.

Anyway, I just hope the problems with the Intel SSDs get fixed asap. A lot of other makers have screwed them all up too. But it is rather sad to see some really basic problems. I wish the firmware was open source, then we would just fix it for them

[idata]

I ran into this myself with my Intel 520 Series SSD as well. Everything was running fine for months, then out of the blue my machine started BSODing and rebooting which then of course I ended up looking at a screen with "No Boot Device Found".

I talked to the warranty company that's handling the warranty for this SSD and I told them that it's randomly dropping from the SATA channel. I ended up talking to someone who was fairly knowledgeable about computers, or at least sounded like he was, he knew what I meant by dropping from the SATA channel. He even asked if I tried another device on the port, yep... I told him yes, I did and those had no issues.

So here I am, with an Intel SSD that's useless to me, completely unreliable. I can't trust it to keep my data. So off to the warranty company it goes.